The Sapphic corpus consists today of about 50 pages of fragments of lyric poems from the late 7th and early 6th centuries BC. These are chance survivors of the winnowing of time, some gleaned from quotations in the works of other ancient authors, some recovered from torn and ravaged scraps of papyrus which the dry, hot Egyptian climate allowed to survive. This slender and partly incomprehensible body of text is of immeasurable importance in the story of our culture. Its significance goes beyond the question of the work’s quality--though that has been much praised. Plato, for example, called Sappho the tenth Muse (Anth. Pal., 9.506), and Ezra Pound remarked that there was nothing better in literature than the one long passage (fr. 1) which was known when he wrote. The scholar and translator Henry Wharton referred to Sappho in 1885 as “the Greek poetess whom more than eighty generations have been obliged to hold without a peer.” While judgments of quality are in general less stable nowadays than for a long time, this one seems to remain unvarying among those who bother to acquire the ability to read the relevant texts.
Perhaps more important than the question of quality is the fact that Sappho’s fragments constitute the central piece of evidence for an enormously important shift in human cultural and psychological history, one of a handful of specially formative moments in the western tradition--what Bruno Snell, in The Discovery of the Mind, called “the rise of the individual in early Greek lyric.” Snell meant primarily the first expressions of subjectivity. The corpus of Bronze Age literature and of the literature directly derived from it, such as the Homeric epics, shows only communal modes of discourse. The poet speaks as a disembodied voice of tradition, or of the community, rather than as an individual center of subjectivity describing his or her experiences, feelings and observations. The subjective voice does not clearly appear anywhere in the world until the Greek lyric age. There it is encountered in the 7th century BC, in the milieu of the breakdown of feudal landholding aristocracies and the rise of a new competing elite based not on inherited land but on wealth newly acquired through the opening of foreign markets to trade. In this situation, which was to recur in European history at a later age, the aristocratic tradition of wealth held by privilege was challenged by the emerging bourgeois tradition of wealth held by initiative; as a part of its ideology of personal initiative the new party began to make claims for the reality of the individual rather than the class. Not far behind was the age when artists would begin signing their works and poets expressing their private feelings. This is precisely the milieu in which Sappho lived; one of her brothers, Herodotus tells us, was an entrepreneur who marketed Greek wines in Egypt.
The early phase of the monodic or individual poem, insofar as it is visible from extant texts, extends from Archilochus in the 7th century to Sappho a generation or two later and from her, in another generation, to Anacreon. In this lineage it is really Sappho who predominates. The Archilochean remnants are very slight, though incredibly powerful in their freshness; the Anacreontic fragments, though more abundant, are already slightly overripe. It is the sapphic fragments in which the voice of subjectivity speaks most extensively and plainly, and with more self-consciousness in its articulations, than any other voice from a comparably early culture.
Thirdly, the significance of this author in feminist history cannot be exaggerated. She is one of a lineage of primal feminists that includes Hatshepsut. She is the Ur-model of the female artist. Futhermore, she was, in terms of modern feminist trends, a radical. Her unabashed expression of a lesbian point of view (named indeed for the island of Lesbos, where she lived) and her direct and fundamental addresses to the question of gender attitudes--such as her reversal of male values in fragment 16--laid the foundations on which the gender debate still stands.
Finally, as we shall see in part in the following pages, Sappho’s linguistic usage, along with her personally crafted body of poetic imagery, set the terms for much of the lyric tradition, not only for Catullus and Horace, but down to and including Hölderlin and Yeats. In the invention of the lyrical stance she forged fundamental innovations in the relations between signifiers and signifieds; the new linguistic methods she came up with made possible the hyper-expressive and intensified mood of the lyric, in which the individual voice seems to confront infinity, and have recurred, in a similarly fundamental role, in modern poetry. It would not take special pleading to argue that she was the most influential poet of the western tradition.